My Summer With George (8 page)

Oooohhhh.

M
OST WEEKENDS, I DRIVE
out to the country, to my Sag Harbor house. I leave early Friday morning, hitting the LIE long before the endless line of cars queues up for the Hamptons. But this Friday, my women’s group was holding a birthday dinner for a dear friend, Mary Smith, so I agreed to have lunch with George.

He called around eleven to say he was running late. Could I come up to Columbia and have lunch there? At noon?

Of course I could, I said without thinking. But afterward I shivered: another cancellation, and after we’d had such a nice time the night before!

I had to race to dress: I didn’t want to go in my jeans and T-shirt. It was a long trip to Morningside Heights, and despite my rushing, I was late. I didn’t reach the coffee shop he’d described until almost twelve-thirty. George was sitting with four other people, three men and a woman. He introduced them to me as editors attending the conference. They were halfway through their sandwiches, so I just ordered coffee and a muffin. I listened as they happily dissected the conference. I didn’t feel too left out, because every once in a while George would lean toward me and whisper some explanation of what was being discussed. He made me feel cherished, despite the awkwardness of the meeting.

A little before one, they all pushed back their chairs and rose.

“Today’s the last day of the seminar,” George explained. “They’re giving us a cocktail party at five, so we have a short lunch break, one hour instead of two. That’s why I asked you to come up here.”

Inside, I froze, but I tried to control my facial expression. I stood, tossing some bills on the table for my half-eaten muffin.

“Oh, hey, I’ll get that!” he cried.

“It’s nothing.” I shrugged.

He walked with me out to the curb. “How will you get back?”

“I’ll take a cab.”

“I’ll flag one for you,” he said, stepping into the street.

“It’s all right. I can do it. Your friends are leaving,” I said, nodding at their receding backs.

“Okay, then. Well, I’ll call you!” he cried, striding off. He didn’t look back.

During the nearly fifteen minutes it took to get a cab, it began to rain. When, finally, a gypsy cab stopped, I took it eagerly. I slid onto the seat, soaking wet, and leaned back, my head numb.

I was shaking with anger and hurt. I wanted to hurt him back. I wanted to leave him in the lurch, let him know what it felt like. I wanted to drive out to Sag Harbor this afternoon, strip off my clothes, and dive into the bay, letting New York—and George—roll off my body like a coat of sweat. He must have known earlier that today was the last day of the seminar, but he hadn’t mentioned it. He must have known about the short lunch hour: why had he made me travel so far for so little? If the seminar was over, would he be leaving now? He said he’d call me. When? From where? Louisville? What was I doing with this man? What was I doing with myself?

I decided to spend the afternoon working. But I couldn’t concentrate. I kept jumping up to rearrange a file, water a plant, deadhead another, get a cup of tea. I wandered through my apartment blindly; my magnificent rooms could have been one long subway stop, for all the pleasure they gave me. Around four, I lay down on the chaise in my study and fell into a deep, disturbed sleep.

I woke feeling logy, reluctant to get up. Could I be depressed? That is extremely rare for me. I determined, as a matter of will, when I had my first child under rather trying circumstances, that no matter how unhappy I felt, I would not, like my mother, lay a black cloud over my children’s lives. Whatever my problems, I would remain cheerful or at least stoical. To do this, you have to emphasize the hopeful elements in any situation or even, in some cases, invent some. In other words, you have to be able to lie, to others and to yourself. I had grown quite adept at this over the years.

My depression arose because my self-deceit was wearing thin: I was losing faith in George’s attraction to me. His seesaw motions were starting to feel like a pattern, in which resided something deep and negative that would never be resolved but would simply continue. I was urgently fighting off an awareness of this. I felt, in regard to him, as if I were carrying a vial of nitroglycerin: if I dropped it, all of what I had planted in him, in our relationship, would blow up in my face. And I wanted to avoid that above all. I’d rather let him treat me shabbily than accept that failure. After all, I had only two choices: I could let myself love him and hope he would return it, thus risking disappointment or even serious hurt in the future; or I could retreat behind my prickly wariness and end this right now.

If I had been thirty or forty, I would have ended it then. Before my mid-fifties, I met attractive men with some regularity. I could count on meeting at least one every few months, and there were periods in my life when the world seemed to be populated mainly by amusing sexy men. There simply wasn’t time for all of them, alas, but a light regularly went on in me, indicating that I was sexually alive. I relished the feeling.

This was no longer the case. Nowadays, not just months but years went by without my meeting a man who shimmered for me, who made the night brilliant. Partly this was because I had erected a new barrier to love—age. I created it out of cowardice, nothing else. It wasn’t that twenty-odd-year-old boys no longer appealed to me (although, in truth, they no longer did). But mainly I dreaded being perceived as acting flirtatious or seductive toward anyone who might find my no longer young person repulsive. So afraid was I of finding my physical being a source of repugnance that I simply
erased the
young from my sexual vision, I deleted their existence from my sexual consciousness as completely as if they had been some other form of life, robots or chimpanzees, say. But of course, to expunge any class of people from consideration greatly reduces one’s possibilities. Moreover, as I aged further, the ban silently spread from people in their twenties to those in their thirties; I was eliminating the most gorgeous people in the world, so of course I faced greatly diminished prospects.

I gave this matter considerable thought, but I always ended up making the same choice. Even if it meant feeling less than alive sexually and possibly even sacrificing some possible felicity, I would censor my vision, limit it to people within a decade or two of my own age rather than find myself reflected in the eyes of some beautiful young person as a ludicrous grasping old lecher.

Perhaps as a result of this policy and the generally uninspiring appearance of most (but by no means all—consider George!) people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies; or perhaps because desire does wane as one grows older; or because older people who remain vivid and interesting tend to be deeply committed to long-term relationships—the last decade of my life had been far less populated with sexual partners than earlier ones. The truth is, there had been none. And while I missed the frequent passionate raids, forays, and pincers movements from near strangers that I used to enjoy—missing, no doubt, because of signs of age on my own person—I was even more disturbed at the fact that I myself rarely felt drawn to anyone, rarely found anyone desirable. I missed feeling desirable, but even more, I missed feeling desire.

Yet I had felt drawn to George from the first moment I laid eyes on him, and felt desire for him the moment he looked at me with excitement. This feeling was too rare, too precious nowadays for me to let it go, even if grasping it meant I would eventually suffer—indeed, was suffering already. With this man, I was sexually reborn, reawakened, returned to youth and vitality. How could I not submerge myself in the feeling, clasp it to me like a dram of eau-de-vie, the water of the fountain of eternal youth?

I thought about all this as I dressed for dinner. I wondered if I would bring it up that evening.

I love my women’s group. Women’s groups are the most wonderful thing about living in New York or Boston. They do not exist in many parts of the world—although they would if women dared to form them. It just isn’t customary in some places. I don’t know how things are in Detroit or Cleveland, but if a French or German or Italian woman has no husband, she is likely to have almost no social life either. And most older women don’t have husbands, so many lead very lonely lives. I have two communities: one in the city and one in Sag Harbor. I’m lucky enough to have groups of women friends in other cities and abroad too.

Just about all my friends are self-made women, but some of us are more so than others: Mary Smith and I have reinvented ourselves right down to our names. Thirteen years ago, Mary left her husband and academia and took up a new career as a photographer and bisexual. She purposely chose an anonymous name and won’t reveal her original one, but ironically, she’s made her anonymous name famous. As Mary Smith, she photographs scenes and people in such a way that the violence or hatred underlying them is just perceptible. She’ll photograph a parent with a child at a moment when one of them is just breaking into rage, or the sky the moment before a storm breaks. So her name has become part of the language—“Mary Smithing” something means capturing emerging violence when it is barely perceptible.

Mary was turning forty, and her agent, Naomi Gold, wanted to throw a big party for her most important client. But Mary said it was bad enough to be forty without advertising it. I told her if she thought forty was bad, just wait. But she was immovable. So Naomi arranged this dinner instead.

There were to be eight of us—Mary, Naomi, Enid, Dotty, Babette, Hazel, Leni, and me. Mary, Babette, and Dotty are good friends of mine; the others are pals, people I enjoy seeing once in a while.

Babette Goodman is in her sixties. She’s in the House of Representatives, a Democrat, ardent and mouthy and tough and effective. You can count on her to support every humane piece of legislation that breaks through the Washington fog and to fight everything that tends to make the rich richer. My friends and I are among the many people rooting for her to run for the Senate. So is her husband, Bob, who, she says, makes it possible for her to function. Bob raised their two boys, Bob oversaw the house, even though he has a law practice. They’ve been married for almost forty years, but they still adore each other. They are the kind of couple everybody else points to and envies. They are the kind of couple we all believe we are supposed to be but few of us are.

Dotty Dunn, the actor, is in her late thirties, the youngest member of our group. She has to go where the parts are, and since there are few parts for black women on Broadway, no matter how brilliant and beautiful, she’s often away, in Hollywood or Europe or on location in some exotic place. She lives in a sinking gloom grace-noted by hope: it’s wonderful how actors can sustain themselves by believing year after year that the next part will make all the difference, will make them a star. We all try to sustain Dotty in this hope, which may not be unrealistic, after all. She’s a terrific actor. Anyway, she needs it. Dotty lives alone; she’s been divorced three or four times but seems to live in the same kind of hope about the next husband as about the next part. I guess she’s an incorrigible optimist.

Enid deMaille is closing in on fifty. A professor of French at Hunter, she’s written several books on French feminism. She’s successful in her field, even famous, but her life is permeated by bitterness. She and her husband used to translate French philosophy together; they did brilliant work, but Julian believed the brilliance came only from him, that Enid dragged him down. In time, he left Enid for a very young woman, a student of his who also worked on translations with him but didn’t demand credit on the title page. The quality of his work with the younger woman was much poorer. It was a pity: Enid and Julian both still do translations, but neither is as good alone as with the other. What Enid can’t get over, though, is not the lost gift but Julian’s abandonment. Her face is sunk in permanent shock and disappointment, which is echoed in her voice.

Enid’s best friend is Hazel Heron. Hazel became famous during the Vietnam War, when she won several prizes for her incisive journalism. Her war reportage was collected in a book that became a best-seller and made her rich for a while. She’s fallen on harder times in recent years. Maybe nothing has inspired her as the war did. But she also has been involved with several men who lived off her, contributing nothing. She’s in her fifties now and worried: her work doesn’t command a high price anymore, she’s lonely, and she’s bitter toward men—and even more so toward women. It’s sad.

I had never met Naomi Gold before. She turned out to be a pleasant-faced woman in her fifties, wearing a tight-fitting velvet vest and a leather skirt that just covered her crotch. She’s very thin and has good legs, but good as they are, her body and legs are still fifty-odd years old. She is a photographers’ agent and Mary’s good friend. She was married for thirty years to a great photographer, Parris Gompers. His brilliant photographs and her brilliant promotion made them both rich and famous, and they lived the life of a dream couple, traveling everywhere, knowing everyone, invited to White House dinners, awarded prizes by foreign governments, that sort of thing. But he had left her a few years before for a very young woman, and all the prestige and acknowledgment went with him. Since she had always concentrated mainly on him, signing few other clients, she almost lost her business too. She built the agency back up—Mary’s recent fame helped—but she remained hurt and betrayed, in a state of shock. She had long brown hair that hung around her long, thin face, and she radiated kindness. I thought I’d like to know her better.

Then there was Leni Hauser, a playwright, an effervescent woman with curly red-blond hair. Leni is the happiest person I know. She’s full of laughter and amusing anecdotes; she has a warm outgoing interested manner toward everyone she meets, from street panhandler to Broadway producer. I’ve decided her happiness arises from having a lucky life: she has a wonderful supportive husband and three gorgeous feminist sons, and she knows everyone in the New York theater. If she’s had a few problems getting her plays mounted, well, who hasn’t? And as dramatists go, she’s considered a success—she’s had a play mounted at the Lucille Lortel!